Undergraduate · Law
Bachelor of Arts / Bachelor of Laws (Honours)
University of Newcastle, Newcastle, NSW, Australia
About this program
Newcastle Law School runs its combined Arts/Law as a six-year honours program, letting students build a genuine arts major (history, politics, English, whatever they choose) alongside the professional law sequence rather than squeezing electives in around the edges. The law school is smaller than the Group of Eight competitors, which in practice means smaller seminar groups in the later law units and closer contact with individual academics, something the school leans on in its own promotional material and which alumni feedback generally backs up.
The Newcastle Legal Centre gives students access to genuine legal clinic experience: supervised casework for real clients, mostly in areas like tenancy, family violence, and social security, which is a more hands-on clinical legal education offering than a lot of comparable regional programs manage. Newcastle also has a strong environmental and natural resources law research group, unsurprising given the Hunter region's mix of mining, agriculture, and coastal development creates a steady stream of live legal issues on the doorstep.
Graduates need to complete Practical Legal Training after the degree (the JD or PLT year) before admission as a solicitor, same as anywhere else in NSW, but the combined degree's arts component is genuinely substantial rather than a token humanities gloss.
Cost & duration
English test scores
Verified newcastle.edu.au ↗
Course structure
4 terms of coursework
Years 1-2: Arts major coursework (history, politics, English, or other approved major) alongside foundational law units
- Legal Method, Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law
- Years 3-4: Continued arts major units, Property Law, Equity, Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Evidence
- Years 5-6: Advanced law electives, Corporations Law, Legal clinic placement option (Newcastle Legal Centre), capstone law units, honours thesis or coursework honours component
- Practical Legal Training required post-graduation for admission as a solicitor in NSW
Admissions
Completion of Year 12 / ATAR approximately 85-90, combined Arts/Law degree
Why trust Where To Apply
- Official sources onlyEvery deadline, fee, and requirement traces to a university, government, or admissions-body page.
- Dated and re-checkedEach fact carries the date it was last verified, on a quarterly re-verification cadence.
- IndependentNo university pays for inclusion, a better write-up, or a higher rank. We are not an education agent.
- Named editor, public methodWritten and maintained by a named operator against a published methodology.